Delos

DelosA print of Delos the small, dry island at the centre of the Cyclades that was, in Greek religion, the most sacred place in the Aegean, the birthplace of Apollo and of his twin sister Artemis. The myth: Leto, pregnant by Zeus, was driven from land to land by the jealous Hera, who had forbidden any "firm ground" from taking her in to give birth. Poseidon raised Delos out of the sea as a floating island neither firm nor fixed and Leto came ashore there,

while Bellerophon drives his spear down into the triple-bodied beast — lion in front

It is deliberately oversized

and divided rulership of the cosmos — sky for himself

pure white

The complete versions

A print of Walter Crane's Hercules and Atlas — one of the plates for Nathaniel Hawthorne's A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys (Houghton Mifflin

set an impossible task by Venus

Reproductive engraving — line-engraved plates after celebrated paintings and sculptures — was the 19th century's primary way of disseminating great art to households that would never see the original

the vomitoria and the galleries are all there

including a sealed jar that contained all the world’s evils

The twins were born to Leda

The Temple of Bacchus at Baalbek